Site-Specific Performance

Description

Site-specific performance – acts of theatre and performative events at landscape locations, in village streets, in urban situations. In houses, chapels, barns, disused factories, railway stations; on hillsides, in forest clearings, underwater. At the scale of civil engineering; as intimate as a guided walk.

Leading theatre artist and scholar Mike Pearson draws upon thirty years practical experience, proposing original approaches to the creation and study of performance outside the auditorium. In this book he suggests organizing principles, innovative strategies, methods and exercises for making theatre in a variety of contexts and locations, and through examples, case studies and projects develops distinctive theoretical insights into the relationship of site and performance, scenario and scenography. This book encourages practical initiatives in the conception, devising and staging of performances, while also recommending effective models for its critical appreciation.

‘Mike Pearson’s vast experience with both the practicalities and the theory of site-specific theatre makes him the ideal author of Site-Specific Performance. This rewarding study offers challenging contexts, questions, and exercises for students. It engages with the broad range of disciplines upon which one may call for site-specificity, privileging place but not overlooking the significance of bodies, time, and other considerations which help determine place.’ – Joanne Tompkins, Professor of Drama, University of Queensland, Australia